Changing rooms at secondary school

[Timefliessofast]

Our kids wear their PE kit all day on PE days so getting changed for PE isn't a thing for them. When they started school swimming lessons they were horrified by the communal changing room (I can't swim so never took them swimming).
I've tried to reassure them that's what we had at school and it's quite normal. The problem is I went to school "in the olden days". Can anyone tell me what they can expect regards getting changed for PE once they start secondary school?

My child refused and the school and I supported them. They used the toilet cubicle.

I find the contradictory challenges of child protection and body privacy against open communal changing rooms crazy.

We tell them they have a right to privacy and then tell them to get changed on an area with others

Pretty standard but there is usually a space with a couple of cubicles too

School pool is available to the public at certain times and is all cubicles. Pe changing room I’d completely communal. DS wears a t shirt under his shirt on pe days so just has to take off shirt and tie and swap trousers for shorts.

Long overhead towels that you might use at the beach. Keep everything hidden.

It’s unpredictable. Personally I will send my dc with a towel changing robe just for privacy. I don’t mind communal changing myself but I know it can be excruciating during puberty, I wasn’t comfortable in my skin until into my 20s.

They wont need to get fully naked to get changed for PE in secondary, I think pp are thinking you are asking about swimming

I don't know of any changing rooms in secondary schools that are communal. Also in my DCs primary school they have changing rooms for both sexes.

Kids do swimming for P.E. one term a year where we are. I thought it was on the curriculum?

Wow! The schools you know must have so much space! The majority of changing rooms in secondary are communal - obvs split boys and girls.

What's the concern though - they're never naked. Just in underwear.

I don't really understand how they are communal and split boys and girls. Surely those things are completely different.

Split into girls and boys and that space is communal - so all the girls get changed together and all the boys get changed together, surely?

That's how it was in my school as a teenager and more recently in DSS' secondary school.

My school not only had communal changing rooms but communal showers. Thankfully single sex, but I wonder how they would have dealt with the modern transgender nonsense, if a teenage boy insisted he identified as a girl.

Communal doesn't mean mixed sex.

I don't really understand how they are communal and split boys and girls. Surely those things are completely different

Communal means a group of girls or a group of boys all changing together rather than in individual cubicles. Obviously it doesn't mean boys and girls together

@Badbudgeter where we are (Leeds) we only get one term in primary , no swimming at all in secondary